So I go

Dark winter night's have a stale taste on a tongue. Existence and fade are in collaboration to explain one boy's solitude.

Keller watched the old birch sway in the winter storm. It bent and bent, the young trunk able and strong in the gale winds of an Ontario breath. The wind whipped its lashes, fierce and cruel, beating away and carving in scars. River cold and river sliding cross icy beaches. He latched on to the sill, fingers digging into the wood, aching with temptation and glaciation.

There was a boy too. Not running from the snowflakes crashing down around him, nor was he moving to warmth of fire against frost. The shadow spilled from the birch’s branches, feeding in the night. Face cast in rhythmic caliginosity, the boy stared out at the bitten river, ice wreathed eyes glazed with some unknown.

Austin pushed their hands in their coat pocket, the blisteringly shiver-inducing air creeping up their sleeves. It was close to midnight, the clouds a pitch darkness caught in callous fever. They didn’t notice the boy at first as they carefully picked their way past the frigid riverbank. The concrete was slick and their black boots were worn thin.

But there the boy stood, hunched over, back facing Austin. It was something out of a movie, but what genre was left unknown. Hunched shoulders, the vivid imagination left an imprint of winter mornings, alone in a sea of voices and people. It was striking, what they could not see. But the path did not lend Austin time as they hurried home to a furnace and knit blanket.

Levi stretched, arms above her head, out to scrap the walls of her tiny room, before resting them at her sides. The weatherman forecasted another three feet of snow with his bow tie and sweaty eyes. A lecture from her mother had her cross checked into her bedroom for the night without her gaming console. So she sat in darkness, swearing at the weatherman.

And out there, she swore she saw a pair of eyes, glinting across the river between whirlwinds of gusting snow. The river was not wide, but a narrow monster, twisting and rearing back at a moments notice. The eyes glinted under the birch tree, swarmed in fake fur of a winter coat. They rested below Levi, bequeathed in some story she could not know. Levi turned back to her pale green walls and complained.

Jenny and Jacob leaned against the bottled up bar door, the chill of glass seeping into their too thin clothes. They were california born and bred, people of heat and endless summer skies. But a steadfast lining of desire had brought them here. Brother and sister shared the comfort of rap music as skies rained down upon them in shivering streaks.

And there was boy, clothed in colorless binds. Grey and black and white shrunk his form, by the riverfront. Standing. Unmoving. Falling in and out of existence. Jenny whispered the rap music, tongue sharp with vowels and soft consonants. Jacob hesitated, falling out of sound. And back into it, with a harsh crack of youthful ignorance.

Samson, hitherto to be known and referred to as Otherwise. And he muttered to himself, I have all the pieces, I only need put them together. Otherwise sat in his dusty chair, in his dusty office, waiting for something. The big bay windows of the steel edifice hovered over him in a claustrophobic fashion, making the world so big, it turned tiny.

And he did not see. And he did not hear. And the snow muffled the skies and the howls and the vibrato of empty streets. Eyes closed. Eyes lost in a hundred shades of bronze spinning round in tetrahedrons. Geometric shapes, twisting like the river falling. Falling. And Otherwise was alone in an otherwise lonely way.

Maybe the boy had a name. But it wasn’t important. It rang and rang and rang, echoing in the night and solitude. It weakened under the harsh street lamp, fluttering away in the haggard wind. And those who saw, never saw. Those who turned, forgot. And those who looked on, were forgotten. So it goes.

So it goes, repeated the boy, hands clutched around a wearing worn novel struck thin and burdensome. Clutched by hand forth written to bear, inked in black hollows, under the birch tree young and strong. It bent and bent, able and strong, and broke free, bent and bent.

So it goes, said he.

So it goes, said they.

So it goes, said she.

No, the boy said, So I go.